


Paging Dr. Scully

by Mangokiwitropicalswirl



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode: s01e03 Squeeze, Episode: s01e05 The Jersey Devil, Episode: s01e06 Shadows, Episode: s01e07 Ghost In The Machine, Episode: s01e08 Ice, Episode: s01e11 Space, Episode: s01e12 Fire, F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2018-12-02 16:49:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 14,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11513439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mangokiwitropicalswirl/pseuds/Mangokiwitropicalswirl
Summary: This drabble is in response to an ask sent to @wtfmulder on Tumblr"i'm a baby phile so i have no idea if this has been done already, but an au where scully ends up becoming a doctor instead but always ends up taking care of this smartass fbi agent who's in the icu every couple of weeks and talks about his monster hunting adventures and flirts with her while he's high on pain meds"wtfmulder  answered:"This is fucking adorable and I wanna fic it a lot"Here ya go. My little take.





	1. Squeeze

**Author's Note:**

> This drabble is in response to an ask sent to @wtfmulder on Tumblr
> 
> "i'm a baby phile so i have no idea if this has been done already, but an au where scully ends up becoming a doctor instead but always ends up taking care of this smartass fbi agent who's in the icu every couple of weeks and talks about his monster hunting adventures and flirts with her while he's high on pain meds"
> 
> wtfmulder answered:
> 
> "This is fucking adorable and I wanna fic it a lot"
> 
> Here ya go. My little take.

“He’s asking for you again.”

“I'm sorry?” She looks up from her charting at the nurse standing in front of her.

“The patient? Room 42?” The nurse nods toward the door. “The cute FBI agent. He’s asking to see ‘the red haired lady doctor’ again.”

“Haven’t you discharged him yet?” She sets down her pen and leans against the stool back, raising her shoulders up to stretch muscles that are now 10 aching hours into a 12 hour shift.

“He said he had another question for the doctor before he would agree to leave,” the young nurse explains as she walks closer and leans in. “I think he wants your number,” she smirks. 

Dana Scully smiles and rolls her eyes and retrieves the patient’s chart from underneath the pile of discharge paperwork. She flips open the file to review the notes she’d made some hours before when he’d come in. She certainly remembered him -- brought in from a scene of a violent break in, babbling about some suspect who had tried to extract his liver. The chart indicates his name is Fox Mulder -- she remembers now, because who on earth would name their child Fox? 

She’d come in to examine him, barely glancing at his face, while the nurses filled her in on his reasons for admittance.

“Take off your shirt, please,” she had asked, her eyes scanning the notes about his scuffle with the suspect, who left long scratches across his ribcage. 

“Usually I make a girl buy me dinner first at least,” he’d retorted with a grin, shrugging the hospital gown down his shoulders so she could investigate his wounds.

That had gotten her attention. She blushed slightly and looked up from the chart to catch his eye. A gleam of intelligence she was unused to seeing in the weekend knife-and-gun club ER regulars met her gaze and it threw her for a moment. He had deep hazel eyes and a disarming smile, and she’d had to swiftly stuff down her feelings of attraction. He was handsome. But handsome patients arrived in her ER daily, and she always stayed professional, detached, and thorough. 

She has him sit up on the edge of the bed while she palpates his neck where he’d been choked, and pushes the stethoscope against his shapely chest to listen to his breathing. With him sitting on the bed, they are nearly the same height. She’s not sure why she notices that.

She makes note of the length of the scratches on his chest. They’re deep across his torso, as if, just as he said, someone had been trying to extract his liver with bare hands. She measures them and makes a note.

“Hmmm,” she says under her breath. “That’s unusual.”

“What’s unusual?” He asks.

“I’ve just never seen a bruising pattern like this, it’s quite a lot larger than what I would expect to see …”

“From a human?” he interrupts her eagerly, a look in his eye like a puppy waiting for a treat.

“From.. a normal man-sized hand,” she finishes, looking at him with a puzzled wrinkle of her brow.

His looks a little crestfallen, and she finishes the exam.

“No permanent damage I can see,” she tells him as he pulls his gown back up. “I’ll prescribe some pain pills and you’ll have a little bruising, nothing serious.”

He nods. “Thanks doc.” He offers her his hand, which startles her a little. It’s a gesture between equals, not the usual posture of a patient in her care.

“You’re welcome agent,” she looks down at his intake docs, “Mulder. You’re welcome.”

 

Now he’s asked her back into his room for no good reason. She should just send the nurse back in with his prescription and tell him to go home. But he’s, after all, good looking, young and obviously employed. Her mother would give her another talking to about giving guys a chance.

“What is it Agent Mulder?” she asks pulling back the drapes at the entrance of his room. He is sitting in the chair beside the bed and bending down to tie the laces on his shoes. He smiles and looks up at her.

“Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?” He waggles his eyebrows as if he’s telling ghost stories around a fire, but there’s a glint of genuine curiosity in his eyes.

“What?” she stutters. “Where on earth is that question coming from?” She’s confused now, this was not exactly what she came in the room expecting.

“Just curious. Do you believe in alien life forms?” He asks again, standing and picking up his suit coat from the back of the side chair.

“Well logically, I’d have to say no,” she answers stuttering, choosing to treat the question more seriously that it deserves. “Given the distances needed to travel from the far reaches of space, the energy requirements would exceed a spacecraft's capabilities.”

“I didn’t ask if you thought aliens have visited us, I asked if you thought that they existed.”

She smiles. He’s caught her dodge. “Well, there is the Fermi Paradox,” she replies, beginning to explain before he cuts her off.

“Which is the apparent contradiction between the high probability of there being extraterrestrial life in the universe and the utter lack of evidence that any such life exists.” He grins, looking far too pleased with himself. But she smiles in spite of it.

“What if I told you, there isn’t a total lack of evidence?” He asks tantalizingly.

“I think I’d say that I should probably check the dosage on your pain meds,” she replies with a sly smile.

“Could I ask you to take a look at something? As a favor?” He switches tack.

“Doesn’t the FBI have armies of specialists at your beck and call?” 

“It does,” he nods, “But let’s just say I’ve run out of favors over there.”

“Agent Mulder,” she begins.

“Just Mulder,” he insists, “the ‘agent’ thing makes me feel like I’m at work.”

“We are at work,” she answers, “MY work. And I need to get back to it. I’m happy to help you in whatever way I can while you’re here, but consulting for the FBI is just a bit above my pay grade.”

“What if I leave you my card and you can call me if you change your mind?” He hands her a slip of paper from his pocket.

“I don’t anticipate that happening,” she shrugs, slipping the card into the pocket of her navy scrubs. “But I will keep you in mind.”

“I hope you will. Nice to meet you,” he holds out his hand. “Doctor?”

“Scully,” she answers. “Dana Scully.”

Something tells her he’s not the kind of guy who gives up easily. She hopes he’s not.


	2. Jersey Devil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somehow a little drabble written as a response to an ask sent to @wtfmulder is turning into a fluffy alternate universe. I’ll update as inspiration strikes, but it’ll be set alongside events of season 1, to start.

“C’mon Dana, your turn. Hook up with any eligible surgeons lately?” Gina nudges her shoulder with just a little too much force, consequence of that second margarita, no doubt.

“And don’t give us any of that ‘I’m too busy’ bullshit either,” Kim chimes in, leaning across the high top table eagerly. “A girl’s gotta live a little!”

Scully sighs and pushes a strand of hair behind her ear as she sips from her own second margarita which has made her slightly warm and talkative. She hasn’t seen all these girls together since undergrad, but Liz is getting married next month. This feels like a last hurrah despite the fact that the real last hurrah probably already happened years ago.

“Well,” Scully begins, taking another swig and wishing that her drink were a little stronger, “I’m supposed to have a date tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow night?!” Liz exclaims and bolts upright on her stool so violently her pink Bachelorette sash slips off her shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell us?! We could have moved this party to next weekend!”

“It’s no big deal,” Scully flushes just a little, “It’s casual. I’ve only met him once. I’ll just head out a little early after lunch tomorrow. I hope you guys don’t mind.” She looks around the table sheepishly, worried they’ll think this is just another time when Dana bails. At least this time she’s not using work as her excuse.

“Oh my god, no! That’s awesome,” Gina leans hard against her shoulder again and rests her hand on Scully’s arm. “We can totally help you prep! What are you wearing?”

“Um,” the color in Scully’s face rises, “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Well, where’s he taking you?” Kim asks.

“And what’s his name?” Adds Liz. “Where’d you meet him?”

Scully’s now remembering why she usually tries to bail on these kinds of things. Bachelorette parties. Tupperware parties. Baby showers. They’re all just an occasion for female interrogation, the kind her mother has perfected over the years.

“His name is Rob. He’s taking me to dinner.” She swallows hard. “We met at Ellen’s last weekend.”

“Niiiice,” Gina smiles. “Points for asking you out right away.”

“Yeah,” Scully smiles, “I guess he called Ellen to get my number.” 

“What’s he do?” Asks Kim.

“Um, I think he’s some kind of tax attorney?” Scully shrugs and stirs the remaining ice cubes in her glass. “I didn’t quite catch what he said on the phone.”

“Stable job, very nice,” Liz nods approvingly.

“Boring as shit, I bet,” Gina snorts, now more than halfway done with margarita number three.

Kim laughs with Gina and downs the rest of her drink. “Yeah, but maybe he has other qualities,” she raises her eyebrows suggestively. 

The group dissolves into laughter and signals for another round of margaritas. Scully’s had enough to drink that she’s actually enjoying herself now. And despite not really wanting to be the center of attention on Liz’s weekend, it feels good to share her news with friends. She’s been far too busy working for far too long. Her friendships have suffered. She barely has time to keep up with people she already knows, let alone meet new people suitable to go out on dates with.

Before long, the group’s attention shifts, and Gina, who was always the ringleader for mischief, has suggested they play craps. “Four hot babes, out on the town!” Gina exclaims, wobbling in her heels toward the casino floor. “Atlantic City won’t know what hit it!”  
____

Five hours later Scully is standing over Gina’s bed in the ER, internally berating herself for not keeping track of drinks. She is a doctor now, for goodness sake. She should know better. But thinking back, she realizes they have hardly eaten anything. And once they were at the craps table, drinks just kept on coming. Liz was quickly singled out as having bride’s good luck, and so they’d blown on dice and sidled up to the business men and frat boys at the table, watching the piles of chips ebb and flow. They were having fun. Right up until the minute a perilously drunk Gina tilted over on her heels and banged her head against the table as she fell.

Scully has managed to sober up enough to play go-between with Gina and the nurses. She feels responsible, and had been the one to call the ambulance and ride along while Kim and Liz had stumbled up to bed. Plus, she spends most of her weekend nights in hospitals now anyway, just not usually on the patient side of things. Her head hurts and she needs some clarity, or at the very least some coffee.

Under the neon lights of the hospital cafeteria, she feels at home. She could be in her own hospital right now, on break in the middle of the night. It’s oddly comforting. She’s paying for her coffee when he taps her on the shoulder.

“What’s up doc?” He’s grinning as he sets his own coffee next to hers and signals to the cashier that they’re together. “I’ll get these.”

She turns and only sees the profile of his face, and it takes her half a minute to place him, her brain still a little fuzzy from the drinking. “FBI, right?” She guesses, then gestures at the coffees. “You don’t have to do that. Really.”

“I owe ya,” he replies. “Those were some quality pain pills you got me.”

She remembers now. His name is Fox. She remembers they’re the same height when he’s sitting. She remembers she’d flushed internally at the sight of his bare torso when she conducted her exam. The weird question about aliens he’d asked her, and that she’d misplaced his business card somewhere in the pocket of her scrubs.

“Thank you, um, Fox, right?” She tries out his name, hoping she’s not making a mistake.

“Mulder. Please.” She startles as he places the flat of his hand against her lower back and guides her gently toward a table. “I even made my parents call Mulder.”

“Well Mr. Mulder, what brings you to Atlantic City?” Scully settles into the uncomfortable molded plastic chair and begins adding cream and sugar packets to the thick black liquid hospitals try to pass as coffee.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Mulder laughs and sits down in the chair across from her. 

Maybe it’s the lingering tequila, or the handsome scruff of five-o’-clock shadow on his jaw, but she leans forward and takes a sip. “Try me,” she say conspiratorially.

“Well, I guess you could say I’m hunting monsters.”

Scully snorts, a little bit of coffee going up her nose. 

“Don’t laugh,” he quickly says. “At least this time I’ve got some evidence. There’s a body in the morgue with cuts and teeth marks from where this Jersey Devil ate flesh off its bones.”

“Jersey Devil, huh? I think I remember that story from Girl Scout camp.” Scully’s skeptical, but just a tiny bit intrigued as well. “So you were in the morgue?”

“Yeah, I was just down there trying to get them to transfer the body up to Quantico, but the medical examiner’s not having it.” He sighs and leans back in his chair, stretching his long legs out into the aisle.

“It’s almost midnight on a Friday,” Scully wrinkles her brow and takes another sip. “Please don’t tell me these are standard FBI hours?”

“No,” he shakes his head, “let’s just say this is an outside project of my own. A little side investigation.”

“Ah, I see.” Scully smiles at the earnest way he talks. He’s crazy, but he’s sincere, which is a strangely appealing combination in a guy. Between the monster hunting and the question about aliens, he’s not exactly scoring high on sanity. But there’s something in him that’s disarming, that makes her want to keep on talking to him despite the crazy things he says.

“You know, if you’re serious about this kind of thing, I might know someone who could help.” She reaches toward a non-existent pocket for a pen, and then remembers she’s wearing slim pants and a low-cut top, not scrubs. Instead, she pulls a napkin out of the chrome dispenser. “Do you have a pen?”

Mulder reaches into his breast pocket and hands one across the table to her.

“Professor Diamond, Anthropology Department at the University of Maryland.” She scribbles on the napkin. “He’d be interested in what you’re doing.”

Mulder looks at the napkin and then back up at her again, momentarily bewildered. “Thank you,” he says, surprised she’s taking him so seriously.

Before she can think better of it, Scully slides the napkin back and adds her number. “You can tell him Dana Scully sent you.” She swallows. “My number in case you have trouble reaching him.”

Mulder looks closely at the napkin again and grins. “Dana, huh? I never asked you what you’re doing here. From the looks of it you’re not doctoring tonight. Just here to play some slots?”

“Bachelorette party,” she explains. 

“Yours?”

She swears she sees a tiny hint of disappointment in his eyes, but it could just be her imagination.

“No,” she laughs. “Definitely not. My friend Liz. It’s a group of college friends. One of them drank a bit too much and hit her head on a craps table. And since I’m the doctor friend…”

“You got to accompany her to the hospital.” 

“Yep. And I should probably get back.” Scully stands and extends her hand to him. “Good luck with the monster hunting,” she says sincerely, with just a hint of teasing in her eyes.

“Thank you for the contact. You really didn’t have to do that.” He stands and walks alongside her toward the door.

“You’ll have to let me know what you find out.” She’s surprised by what is coming from her mouth. It’s giving him an opening. She never does that, especially with someone she’s just met. They exit the cafeteria and head opposite directions down the hall, but he stops and turns back toward her before he goes.

“See ya around, Doc.”

She nods and lifts her hand to give a small wave, a pleasant tingle settling in her belly that she knows has nothing to do with the tequila.


	3. Jersey Devil / Shadows

Why had she let Gina convince her to wear the lace bodysuit? 

“I look like a preteen in a Love’s Baby Soft ad,” she mutters to herself in the bathroom mirror at the restaurant as she touches up her lipstick and pushes carefully-curled tendrils behind her ear. 

Normally, she’d have called up Melissa to come help her get ready. Melissa keeps up with fashion trends -- she wears chokers and Doc Martens with bohemian dresses, not a predictable rotation of petite-sized scrubs underneath bleachy-white doctor coats. Scully rarely has a reason to put on anything other than jeans and a sweatshirt in the all-too-short hours between shifts.

But Melissa is away “on walkabout,” as she had put it. Scully had teased her repeatedly for calling an aimless American road trip by the Australian term for an adolescent spiritual rite of passage. “But it IS meaningful, Dana,” Melissa had insisted, her voice deep with conviction. “I want to see what the world holds for me, to open myself up to possibilities.”

Scully had nodded, only the slightest raise of her eyebrow betraying her scepticism that the trip is anything other than an excuse to hook up with random strangers and experiment with mind altering substances of one kind or another. She could have been jealous of Melissa’s unencumbered ways, but that had never been what she wanted from life. 

She had thrived on the challenges of school and the thrill of the ER’s energy. She likes knowing she has control, giving commands to nurses and technicians, swooping in to bring order out of the chaos. That’s what she does. And it’s what she wants -- to make sense of things, to categorize and pin things down. Life should be conquerable, ordered, stable. She needs a partner who wants the same things, right?

Which is why she finds herself sitting across from Rob, the tax accountant, easily eight or ten years her senior. A divorcee. Talking about taking kids to the park, or the museum, or is it the circus? Her mind is wandering.

He is nice enough, pleasant, average-looking, but clean. Uncomplicated. The first date she’s had in far too long. Unless you counted that hospital-basement coffee that the cute FBI agent bought her the night before. 

Fox. Why is she thinking about Fox right now? Rob is explaining some intricate new estate tax law that Congress is considering, which will wreck havoc on his clients’ attempts to exploit the gift tax loophole. 

She keeps the polite smile plastered on her face, ignoring the back part of her brain that begins comparing this conversation to the bizarre repartee she’d had with Mulder -- she remembers he had said to call him Mulder -- his skulking around the morgue, the story about Jersey Devils. She wonders if he’d called up Dr. Diamond, and if he had, what they’d found out. 

Rob is still rambling and she hopes her face isn’t betraying anything but eager, engaged first-date interest. 

Would he call her? She’d basically asked him to. She never does that. Why had she done that? 

“Dana,” Rob says her name suddenly. “Do you need to get that?”

“Hmm?” She gives her head a startled shake. “What?”

“Your pager went off, do you need to call in?” Rob looks dutiful and concerned.

“Oh, sorry!” She looks sheepishly down at her pager. It’s the hospital. “I’ll just be a minute.”

Walking toward the restaurant desk phone, she can’t put her finger on why she feels disappointed. It’s not like she’d given Mulder her pager number. And for goodness sake, she’s on a date with another guy! Get it together, Dana. Her internal monologue is confusing but mercifully cut short when the call in to the hospital switchboard jolts her back into a role she’s more comfortable with.

“Multiple victims from a ten car pile-up headed in, we need you here tonight, Dr. Scully.”

“I'm on my way.” She doesn’t pause to measure the sense of relief that floods her, which is not a typical reaction to news of a long night of triage and trauma. She’ll make her apologies to Rob, but she won’t say anything about rainchecks or next times.  
_____________________________________

She dodges Rob’s phone calls for the next week, although work is genuinely busy enough that she doesn’t have to actually lie about why she’s not calling him back. Her mom is not so easily dissuaded. Maggie can’t seem to understand why her highly eligible daughter has made it to the ripe old age of 29 without at least a steady boyfriend. 

“We just didn’t click, Mom,” she explains as Maggie questions why she’s not going out with Rob again.

“Well honey, sometimes you have to give a guy a second chance to make an impression,” Maggie sighs.

Scully sighs as well. Sometimes she placates her with promises to be more open, but other times, the best approach is to deflect attention to Melissa, who is several years older and also equally unattached. 

“Mom, how’s Melissa? Have you heard from her?”

Maggie knows this is a diversionary tactic, but lets her off the hook anyway. Their conversation wanders away from the topic of Dana’s love life and onto speculations about Melissa’s. 

 

It’s not until a week later Scully remembers that Mulder neglected to call her. And then it’s a quiet Friday another week after that when her phone rings.

“I don’t suppose you’re in Philadelphia right now?” He doesn’t even bother with hello, so it takes her a minute to place the confident, teasing voice on the other end of the line.

“Alas, no,” she smiles, settling down into the soft corner of her couch, propping her feet up on the coffee table. “Why? Should I be?”

“It’s just that I have the strangest hankering to go and see the Liberty Bell. I’ve been here a hundred times and I’ve never seen it.”

“You’re not missing much. It’s a big bell with a big crack, and you have to wait in a long line.”

“Still,” Mulder pauses, “I’d really like to go. You want to come meet me?”

“At the Liberty Bell?” She incredulous, sitting forward on her elbows now.

“Yeah, it’s only, what, three hours drive?”

“Three hours and a dozen tolls,” she laughs. “Plus, I think they’d be closed by the time I get there.”

“Hmmm,” he hums looking at his watch, “true. They probably close after 11.”

“So you’re assuming I’m just going to hop in my car at 8 p.m on a Friday night and meet you in a city three hours away?” Scully is almost impressed by his audacity. “If I remember correctly, we’ve only met twice, and the second time you never called me back.”

“I’m calling you now, aren’t I?” She can hear the smile in his voice.

“Okay, fine. Let’s imagine I hop in my car and meet you in Philadephia. What are you doing up there anyway?”

“On a case. I think I’ve got real proof of psychokinetic activity this time.” He’s breathless, eager.

“Psychokinesis?” Scully laughs. This is an entirely different galaxy -- nay, universe -- from conversations about tax accounting. “You mean how Carrie got even at the prom?”

“Basically, yes.” He laughs too, and then there’s an awkward pause between them, a low hum over the telephone line that’s neither physical nor entirely imagined.

Scully takes a deep breath before she can change her mind.

“Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“Okay, let’s go to the Liberty Bell.”

“Really?” His voice raises half an octave.

“Don’t make me second-guess myself, G-man,” she retorts, getting up from the couch and hurrying to change into something resembling an outfit. “And you better be buying the cheesesteaks because a girl gets hungry after a long drive.”

“You got it, doc.” 

____________________

Three hours is a lot of time to second guess oneself, so she finds herself pushing the speed limit more than her usual nine-and-a-half miles over. If she drives faster, she won’t have a chance to analyze the logic of driving three hours to meet a man she’s only met twice -- both times in a hospital, and both times he has talked about monsters. Well, monsters or aliens.

What the heck is she doing? She doesn’t know, but she can’t suppress the giggle that bubbles in her belly when she imagines his face when she told him she’d come. Somehow she can picture his wide-eyed surprise, and the way his lower lip must have turned up in a smile. 

Why is she thinking about his lip? She barely knows him. Shut up brain. She drives faster.

 

To his credit, Mulder is waiting at the entrance to the deserted Liberty Bell pavilion parking lot with two oblong foil-wrapped cheesesteaks. 

“I had to guess how you’d like yours.” He raises hers up in the air as a greeting as she steps out of the car. “Sorry.”

“I’m sure you did fine,” she smiles, reaching for the sandwich. Now it’s awkward. Should she hug him? Give him a kiss on the cheek? Shake hands? 

He’s not helping, staring at her with a quizzical look, his eyes darting between the sandwich in his hands and still-lit pavilion behind her. Scully raises her eyebrows in a question, and shrugs. 

“Well?” She says.

“C’mon,” he gestures with his head toward the lighted building. “I bribed the guards to keep it open.”

“You bribed the guards?” 

“Bribed, threatened, cajoled, whatever.” He smiles. “The badge comes in handy sometimes.”

“So you’re saying you misused your credentials to convince some poor, beleaguered Liberty Bell attendants to stay open three hours past closing just so we can see this big cracked hunk of tin?” Her words are sarcastic, but her tone rings with delight.

“You make it sound so nefarious,” he says innocently. “Like I said, I just wanted to see it this time.”

“What about the sandwiches?”

“We can eat them inside.”

Scully shakes her head, smiling. This is, hands down, the strangest date she has ever been a part of. And now she’s not even sure it’s a date. He hasn’t attempted to touch her. Not a hug, not a hand on her shoulder. She’s suddenly worried she has misread this entirely, that this is just some strange overture of nerdy friendship. An uncomfortable sinking feeling lodges in her stomach as she searches for a way to ward off her embarrassment if it turns out she made too many assumptions.

But as they walk up to the building, he reaches ahead of her and opens the door, making an arch with his arm for her to walk under. She looks up at him with a smirk as he follows behind her, his hand pressing the lightest touch in the hollow curve of her back.


	4. Ghost in the Machine

It takes less than 30 minutes to wander through the Liberty Bell exhibit hall and eat their cheesesteaks on a park bench. 

“Do you want to grab some coffee?” 

“I guess that depends,” says Scully.

“Depends on what?” He stretches his legs out and leans back against the bench, wiping the last of the cheesesteak grease off his face with a tissue-thin napkin. 

“On whether I’m going to have to keep myself awake for another three hours on my drive back home tonight.” 

She’s not sure what she’s asking. She’s not suggesting they shack up in his hotel room, but it’s midnight and she’s dangerously close to nodding off right here on the bench.

“I could keep you awake, drive back with you,” Mulder offers an arm to her as he stands.

“What about your car?” 

“It’s a fleet sedan. Left it at the Philly offices.”

“How’d you get here?”

“Taxi,” he shrugs again.

“So you could drive back with me tonight? To D.C.?”

“If you don’t mind swinging by the offices to grab my bag, then, yeah. Sure.”

Scully wipes her hands against her pant legs and smiles up at him. “Okay, but coffee first.”

They find an all-night diner and slide across from one another in a vinyl booth. The coffee tastes like pitch and diesel, but Scully hardly cares. The combination of this sudden bout of spontaneity and the gleam in Mulder’s eye has her buzzing already, and no amount of bitter coffee is going to dampen it.

“So, what was it that possessed you to call me up tonight?” She asks him pointedly as she shakes a pack of sugar in her cup.

“What an interesting choice of phrase, dear doctor,” Mulder teases. “What possessed me indeed? That’s exactly what the victim in my case here thought she was experiencing. Seems everyone around her kept coming to a tragic end. She thought that maybe she was possessed by the restless spirit of her dead boss.” He unspools the story like a ghost tale, pausing dramatically, leaning toward her.

Scully pauses, holding the coffee cup halfway to her mouth, her eyes wide. He’s serious. He’s presenting it as if he’s joking, but she can see he’s serious. 

“Was she?” Scully asks him honestly.

Mulder shrugs. “I think so, but the supervising agents on this case weren’t so sure. They didn’t take too kindly to my theories. More interested in pinning the deaths on a local terrorist cell than actually uncovering the truth.” He takes a long swig of his black coffee and glances out the window.

“Do you usually uncover all this... I don’t know,” she pauses, “weird stuff?”

“That’s my deal,” he nods. “They put me on cases where the usual avenues of investigation turn up empty.”

“So that explains your Jersey Devil thing. And the questions in the hospital about whether I believe in aliens.”

“I guess so,” he smiles. “And it’s not every day I meet a girl who can quote me Fermi’s Paradox.”

“That was my undergrad degree talking,” she takes another swallow of coffee. “I majored in physics before med school.”

Mulder’s eyes widen in approval.

She continues. “Not the most typical route, I know, but I liked all the big questions physics asks. And the mathematical theories made O-Chem seem pretty easy in comparison.”

Sometimes Scully feels like she shouldn’t talk too much about her education. More than one girlfriend has reminded her how guys can feel threatened by smart girls. Sometimes even her own mother had suggested that she downplay the fact she graduated early, or that she finished with high honors.

So even though she’s mostly unapologetic for her intellect -- and has the long dating dry spells to prove it -- it’s still not like her to spout off to potential suitors about things like finding O-Chem easy. But there’s something about Mulder that tells her he not only isn’t threatened, but he is finding it compelling. She meets his eyes, a bit embarrassed, and remembers it’s polite to turn the tables.

“How about you? What’d you do in school?”

“Psychology.” He half-mumbles. “At Oxford. Seems the FBI thought I had a knack for getting in the heads of criminals.” He grins.

“So you’re a criminal profiler with a penchant for the paranormal. I think I’ve got it figured out now.”

“Penchant, nice word. Especially at this hour. Remind me not to underestimate you when we play Scrabble.” He glances at his watch. “Should we get going? It’s going to be a late night as it is.”

Scully nods, pretending she didn’t notice he said “when” instead of “if’ in that last sentence, and tips the last drops from her cup. “You want to drive first shift?” She says, holding out her keys.  
________

They’re an hour and a half into the drive, Scully back at the wheel, when the conversation turns. She had asked him about his family, where his parents lived now, where he grew up, all the usual chit chat that gets brought up when you’re just starting to connect. 

“You said you had a sister, where does she live?” Scully asks nonchalantly as she checks over her back shoulder for a lane change. She maneuvers the car in line and glances back at Mulder, surprised to find him gone quiet, a solemn look across his face.

“What is it?” Scully pauses. 

“My sister disappeared when I was 12.” He stops and takes a breath. “We… um… we never found her.”

Scully doesn’t know what to say so she waits to see if he wants to tell her more. 

“She’s the reason I got into all these cases,” he goes on. “Her disappearance was dismissed as unexplained. We never got a satisfactory answer.”

“I'm so sorry,” Scully feels like she should pull over and intently listen, but there’s a sense in which the moving car is propelling him. This way, he doesn’t have to look at her. She senses that it’s easier if he can just stare ahead and talk. 

“It’s okay.” He swallows. “I’ve done a lot of work to understand it. And I’ve come to believe that I can find her. These cases are a way to get some answers. If not for myself, then at least for people like me, when science can’t explain their losses.”

“That's a beautiful way to look at it.” Scully looks across the console at the stark relief of his profile in the streetlights. “To give a larger purpose to what you do.”

“I’m glad you see it that way,” he smiles weakly toward her. “The Bureau doesn’t always. They think I’m caught up in some harebrained pet project.”

“Well, screw what they think,” Scully blurts out emphatically, surprising herself a little. All these revelations make her like him. A lot. He’s wounded, and noble, and it’s making her want to defend his every move. 

“I should get you to come and work for me,” he teases. “It’d be nice to have an ally.”

“I’ll keep that in mind in case this doctor thing doesn’t work out,” she teases back, smiling, resisting the urge she’s feeling to reach across and take his hand.

It is almost 5 am when they pull, bleary-eyed, in to Mulder’s parking lot. Sleep is drifting over them both so thickly, it is all Scully can do to push the button, pop the trunk and wave goodbye as Mulder stumbles up his stoop. 

“Get some sleep,” she calls out weakly.

“I’ll call you soon, okay?” He calls back, waving.

She sleeps away her Saturday completely.  
_________________

Her Sunday shift bleeds into Monday, and then they ask her to stay on because they’re suddenly short staffed. A scheduling supervisor approved too many people for too many vacation days at once. Even during normal stretches, it’s not that unusual for work to swallow weeks whole without her noticing. She keeps clothes in a locker at the hospital, and naps in empty rooms between rotations. 

So it’s Wednesday before she realizes that if he’s left a message at her home number, he probably thinks she’s blowing him off. She’s never been good at what they call the “work-life balance” and she knows it has driven more than a few potential dates away. But she just doesn’t know how to give her work anything less than everything she has. 

Thursday afternoon she’s writing orders and reviewing charts, hopeful she might get a chance to rush home and take a real bath after several days of hospital quickie showers, when she glances up and sees Mulder pacing in the hall of the ER. He doesn't see her.

Scully smoothes her scrubs and tucks a couple greasy flyaway hairs behind her ears. At first she’s annoyed she never bothers to tuck a tube of lipgloss in her pocket, but as she watches him, it’s evident he’s far too worried about something to take stock of how she looks.

“Mulder,” she calls out, walking toward him where he’s pacing. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Doc.” He looks up, startled and pale-faced. “Oh that’s right, this is your hospital. I didn’t even think….”. He trails off, wiping a bead of sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.

“Seriously, are you okay? You look like you need to sit down.” Scully gestures toward the waiting room.

“I'm fine. It’s…”. He swallows, his eyes darting aimlessly around the room. “A friend of mine. My partner, my former partner…”.

Scully nods, assuming this has something to do with a girlfriend or an ex, determined to look unfazed by whatever he might reveal. “Do you need me to find out if she’s okay?” Scully offers hesitantly.

“No, it’s not,” Mulder stutters, “she’s not, I mean, he’s not… He was my partner at the FBI. Several years ago. He was in an accident in an elevator today. They told me they rushed him here.”

Scully reddens just a little, embarrassed at the tiny flare of jealousy that had sparked inside her gut, and even more embarrassed to have been feeling that amidst what is obviously a difficult and tragic situation. 

“I’ll see what I can do.” She angles her head toward the waiting room. “Why don’t you go sit down? What’s his name?”

“Jerry Lamana,” Mulder answers, reluctantly stumbling back down the hall.

It doesn’t take more than a couple minutes for her to find the intake records. DOA. Dead on arrival.

She’s going to have to tell Mulder that his friend is dead. They have chaplains and comfortable bereavement rooms for this kind of thing, but it seems wrong that anybody else give him the news. She smooths a hand over her hair and takes a swig of stale, lukewarm coffee from her old stained mug. 

At the door of the waiting room, she meets his worried gaze and her own eyes widen. She opens her mouth to ask him to step into a private room, but closes it again when she sees that he already knows what she’s about to say. He’s read her expression effortlessly. She sees his hazel eyes fill up with tears as he stands up to go. She wants to get him out of this public space. She wants to pull him by the arm into a room where he can cry. 

Instead, Mulder gives her a long look as a single tear spills over down his cheek. He nods and mouths, “thank you,” before he turns and goes.

She sees death so regularly, it feels like a blow to the stomach to remember that every death she sees as part of her day in day out business is someone's friend, someone’s partner, somebody’s lover or parent or child. It’s a difficult but essential thing to remember, or she risks becoming cold. A few tears brim in her own eyes as she realizes just how detached she has started to become. And then she feels terrible for the fact she’s also wondering if he’d called her back this week. It’s not the kind of petty thing she should be wondering about when somebody just died. But she’s wondering it anyway, and whether she’ll ever see him again.


	5. Ice

“Dad, do you think I’m becoming detached?” Scully leans back in the dining room chair, fingering the stem of her wineglass. “Emotionally stunted? Immune to feeling?”

“Oh Dana, what would make you say that?” William Sr. replies in a soothing tone. “You were always my soft-hearted girl.”

“I don’t know, Dad.” Scully looks to the distance, then down into her glass. “I saw a friend lose somebody close to him in the ER this week. And I barely cried. It all seemed so rote, so normal. And then I saw him tear up, and I realized I’m giving more attention to all the notations in my charts than the people in the rooms.”

William Sr. nods and places an arm on her shoulder. “You are a good doctor, Dana. You always want to fix people, to make everything better.” He pauses until she looks up at him. “But you can’t fix everything. Some things are out of your control.”

Scully swallows, a lump forming in her throat. Her response is a choked whisper. “I just worry I’m becoming so cold. I don’t want to close off my heart from my work, you know.”

Maggie has stopped clearing away the dishes away and is listening in. “You just sound burned out, dear,” she offers.

“That’s such a cliche, mom,” Scully rolls her eyes and sits up a bit straighter, taking a sip of wine to help steady her voice. “If I’m burned out, then all doctors everywhere are always burned out.”

“I mean it,” Maggie presses further. “When was the last time you stopped working and took a vacation? First, you graduate college early and you start straight into med school. Then you choose emergency medicine as your speciality and dive into your residency without so much as a week off between getting your coat and your first clinical rotation. You’ve been going non-stop since you were 17, dear. I’d say you might be dealing with burnout.”

“Now now, Maggie,” William Sr. chides her lightly, “You know Dana thrives on achievement.”

“It’s true, dad,” Scully adds with a sigh. “I do.” 

Even so, hearing her mother give the details of the last 12 years of her life like that, she is suddenly exhausted. “But… but mom might be right.” 

She looks back and forth at her mother and father and the remnants of the first after-church dinner they’ve managed to schedule in months. She has never felt like she had more stress than the average person, but when looked at objectively, it’s a wonder she hasn’t collapsed from the pressure. 

“What do you think I should do?” She looks at her father, the stalwart Navy captain, as if he should be the one to chart a course for her. The idea that any kind of stress would be too much for her is vaguely embarrassing in light of his rigorous standards. But he is, after all, her dad.

“I can’t answer that for you,” he shakes his head. “But in my opinion, it’s nothing a little more sleep can’t cure.”

“Mom?” Scully knows her mother will see things a bit differently.

“I think you might want to ask about a brief leave of absence, a sabbatical,” Maggie suggests, “I mean, when was the last time you even had time to go out on a date?”

Scully sighs. So often with her mother, it always comes back to her love life. Or lack thereof. Now doesn’t seem to be the time to get into that subject, even if for once, Scully thinks she might have something to share. But now’s not the time to delve into that.

“Honestly mom, dating is the least of my concerns right now…” she trails off wearily, too tired to mount her usual defenses.

“I’m just saying,” Maggie interjects. “These things don’t just happen. It’s not like the right guy is just going to stumble into your ER.”

Scully does her best to hide a smile as she stands up from the table and begins gathering her things to go. In fact, back at home there’s a message on her answering machine from a guy that she met in her ER. A message she’s probably played a half dozen times over the course of the last few days. 

She had finally listened to it the night Mulder’s friend Jerry had died, once she made her way back to her apartment for the first time in days. She had stumbled her way to the couch and barely pulled off her shoes before passing out. When she woke in a puddle of drool, the blinking red light on the console table was the first thing she saw. She had leaned up on her elbows and slapped “play,” trying not to hold her breath as the machine ticked through a couple robo-sales calls and a reminder from her mother that they were due to have lunch after church the next Sunday. Then, his voice filled her apartment, on a message dated from Monday night.

“What’s up Doc? I’m guessing you’re probably on shift at the hospital now. I’ve been thinking about ways to get myself injured so I’d have a reason to see you, but I got a weird case this morning. I’ll have to tell ya about it -- what do you know about artificial intelligence? Because it looks like our robot overlords might be arriving sooner than scheduled. Anyway, I’ll be kinda busy this week with this case, but I wanted to call and say thanks for making the drive up to Philly. You were right about the bell -- it’s a big bell with a big crack, but at least we didn’t have to wait in any long lines. I don’t think I’d mind waiting in a long line with you anyway though.... I know you have my number. Call me when you get a chance.”

The smile that had started when she heard the first words of his message only brightens the longer it goes on. She can hear the grin in his own voice as he pauses at the end of the message before hanging up. 

She hasn’t known how to call back, though, after their interchange at the hospital. She has wanted to give him space, and she knows that he’s probably confused that she hasn’t responded. It’s just all kinds of awkward, so what exactly is she going to tell her parents? Nothing, yet.

“Thank you for dinner, mom. It was wonderful as usual.” Scully hugs her mother and clears away a side dish and some glasses on her way through the kitchen.

“Things will be alright, Dana,” William Sr. stands and places an arm on her hand as they stall by the door. “You have a good head on your shoulders.”

“Thanks Dad.” Scully squeezes his forearm, smiling faintly. “Thanks for the advice.”

In the car on the way home, she decides she has two things to do. First, she needs to call Mulder back, awkwardness be damned. And second, she needs to schedule a meeting with hospital HR and find out about leaves of absence.  
_______________________

Her stomach lurches wildly as the little plane dips and dives through a cloudbank. She hates small planes. She’s not much of a fan of big ones either, but small ones are infinitely worse. She pulls the white fur hood of her puffy jacket closer around her face to try and block the view of the towering peaks looming a little too close through the windows. 

She glances at Mulder in the seat beside her. He’s looking at her with an expression somewhere between “I’m so sorry,” and “please don’t kill me.” He reaches over and laces his fingers overtop her right hand that is gripping the armrest. He squeezes. “Almost there.” He tries to make it sound like a promise, but she hears the hesitation in his voice. 

It’s moments like this that it hits her that she barely knows this man, but here she is, quivering in a tiny prop plane, on their way to God-knows-where for who-knows-why. But she is on a sabbatical and she’s going to Alaska with a man she just met. Her face and her fingers are freezing, but this is the warmest she’s felt in years.


	6. Ice (2)

It has been easier than Scully anticipated to arrange for a brief sabbatical, or more technically a leave-of-absence. On her break on Monday morning, the HR admin smiled knowingly as Scully explained her emotional exhaustion and the years she has gone without a real break, how she sometimes forgets to bathe, and the way the ER’s unrelenting schedule has winnowed away her friendships until there’s almost none left.

“Do you want to quit?” The administrator asks her pointedly.

“No,” Scully shakes her head rapidly. “No, definitely not.” She twists the hem of her coat between two fingers. “I just need some time away. To clear my head. To rest.”

“The hospital cannot promise to hold your job beyond six months, Doctor Scully. It just puts too much a strain on the other physicians,” the admin explains. “I’m sure you understand.”

“Six months?” Scully startles, sitting up straighter. “No, I certainly don’t need six months.”

“How long were you thinking?”

“One,” Scully gulps, “at the most.”

The administrator, Debbie, smiles. “Doctor Scully, one month hardly even constitutes vacation -- you have more than enough PTO saved up for that right now. You don’t need my approval for a month away.”

Scully reddens a little, embarrassed that she had built this request up in her mind. 

“If I may make a suggestion?” Debbie hesitates a moment.

Scully nods. 

“Doctors are notoriously hard on themselves about their responsibilities. But I can promise you that we will handle things around here without you just fine. Why don’t you take three months and see how you feel. If you want to, you can come back earlier than that.”

Three months off still seems an exorbitant indulgence to Scully, but she feels herself nodding in agreement. “Okay,” she takes a deep breath in. “Let’s plan on that for now.”

Walking back to her car, Scully almost stops in her tracks when she slides the car key in the lock. What on earth is she going to do with herself for three months off?  
_______________

The call to Mulder proves to be more nerve-wracking than the visit to HR had been, which surprises her. She can barely remember the last time she felt a tingle in her stomach at the prospect of calling a guy. It had probably been Marcus, in twelfth grade, when she’d last done the “dial quick and hang up” dance, but here she is, staring at the phone like a teenager. 

It’s on her third attempt to dial his number, as she is rolling her eyes at her own behavior, when she nearly drops the receiver as it loudly rings. Without hesitating for another ring, she presses the answer button and stammers out, “Hello?”

“Should I be flattered that you’re waiting by the phone?” A familiar voice teases her through the line.

Scully flushes, feeling exposed and not quick witted enough to parry back. “I, um. I was just about to call you, if you can believe that.”

“Maybe I’m psychic,” Mulder jokes. “Or I must have sensed that you’re home and in need of some diversion. You wanna grab some dinner?”

“It’s Monday night,” Scully stammers, as if that somehow constitutes an answer. “I was just gonna leave you a message. But, um...”

“You gotta a hot Monday night date?” 

“No, I…” Scully pauses, trailing off. “Mulder, how are you? I was so sorry about your friend, about Jerry.”

Mulder goes quiet and she hears his lighthearted tone deflate.

“I’m…” She hears him gulp. “I’m okay. It’s always a surprise to lose someone that young. Even though we all know the job risks, it’s never any easier.”

“And when it’s somebody you know,” she adds.

“Yeah.” He’s quiet, ready to move on to other subjects, but still pensive. “It reminded me how nice it was when I was working with a partner. Now, I usually work alone.”

She can hear regret hovering in the space between his sentences. There’s so much more he isn’t saying. 

“I think I’d like some dinner,” Scully says abruptly. “Tell me where to meet you.”  
_________________

How the impromptu Monday dinner has resulted in an invitation to accompany him to Alaska, Scully still can’t figure out. The burgers had been especially good, that’s true, and the pub had had her father’s favorite Irish cider on tap so she drank two. That might explain how as the night went on she kept finding excuses to touch him, drifting her palm across his forearm when he snatched her extra fries and dipped them in the puddle of leftover ketchup. Or that she let her leg beneath the table brush against his calf, and then left it there until the warmth of their connection seeped into her jeans. 

His eyes had steadily brightened as she leaned closer over the table to listen to some of his funny stories about Jerry and their time together in violent crimes. He gulps back another beer and lets the toe of his left shoe trail a line up the back of Scully’s leg as if by accident. She shivers and drains the last drops of her second cider from the heavy glass.

“You ever thought about law enforcement? Pathology maybe?” Mulder asks.

“You mean, instead of medicine?” This conversation isn’t going where she thought it was.

“No, I mean, using your doctor skills for the FBI.” He reaches for her slender wrist where it’s lying on the table and lifts her hand with both of his, examining it. “I have a feeling you’d be great at it.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.” She is definitely buzzed, and she is maddeningly distracted by his hands as they encircle her wrist. “Actually,” she realizes she hasn’t even told her what she’s done today, asking for a break. “I rarely stop to think much about anything.” 

She slowly turns her hand and interlaces their fingers and brings her other hand around their grip. They’re sort of staring at past each other, Scully bashfully looking past his ear as their hands entangle. “That’s why I’m taking some time off.” She gulps. “I need to stop and think a little more. I’m on a leave of absence.”

Mulder sits up excitedly, pulling his hands out of their tangled grasp. “You should come with me!’ he exclaims.

“Come with you where?” Scully furrows her brow, taken aback by this sudden change of direction.

“To Alaska!” He looks for all the world like a puppy off its leash. “I just got this case. They send me out on Friday. It’s bizarre. This science team in the Arctic went all crazy and the Bureau is asking me to go investigate. I need to put a team together. I’m gonna need some medical expertise.”

Scully sits back and sobers up a little. “Mulder, I’m hardly qualified for field work with the FBI.”

“No, but I could fudge your credentials just a bit.” She can see the wheels spinning in his brain. “And emergency medicine training always comes in handy. I know I could get them to grant a request to allocate some outside specialists.”

“I hate to even mention this, but I did complete my Wilderness First Responder course a couple summers back.” Scully doesn’t know why she’s telling him this when she’s not sure she wants to go. But the excitement in his eyes is hard to counter, and her body thrums with the remembered sensation of his hands enfolding hers.

“That’s perfect!” Mulder exclaims, picking up her hand again. “Whatdya say, doc? Wanna come to Alaska with me?”

In one of the more impulsive moments of her life, Scully swallows hard and smiles back at him. “Let me think about it?”

He tilts his head and something in his eyes melts her resolve.

“Okay, okay,” she hears herself say before her brain can calculate all the variables, the logistics, all the details that she’ll have to manage in the next four days. “I’ll come.”

After dinner, he walks her to her car and tells her he'll call her with all the details for their trip by Tuesday afternoon. Then he leans down and whispers, “Goodnight, Doc,” with his lips tickling the soft skin of her ear. 

Scully freezes, eager to turn her head and catch his lips with hers, but he straightens up and adjusts his coat at the lapels. “Goodnight,” she calls weakly as he bounds toward his car, turning to give her a final quick wink.

She stands fiddling with her keys, willing her shaky fingers to find the handle of the car door. She’ll give him credit for being a gentleman, for enjoying the chase, but her gut is quivering and her heart races. This man is driving her -- rational, measured, careful Dana -- absolutely crazy.


	7. Ice (3)

The door clangs shut, reverberating through the corrugated tin walls of the bunker. She pauses a moment, the sound of his “goodnight, Doc,” dissipating in the darkness. She takes in the details of the empty dorm, the cluttered desk and hutch, family photos, posters and an unwrapped birthday gift. A mini mausoleum. 

A chill runs down her spine and she shoves the desk against the door. “Don’t forget, the spots on the dog went away.” She leaves the light on.   
________________

To say the trip has not been what Scully expected would be a drastic understatement. She’s not sure what she imagined — cozying under a blanket with her notes, Mulder looking up at her from a pile of evidence, snow fluttering down outside the windows? Had she pictured a roaring fire? Had there been a big soft rug in front of that fire? — she’s mortified her subconscious got things so wrong. Whatever she’d imagined, it never included getting snowed in in a bunker, or a growing collection of mysterious corpses. Or unidentifiable black boils erupting on man and beast alike.

The flight in on the jostling plane should have been the first clue that she might be getting in above her head, but she had been too preoccupied by the sensation of Mulder’s hand over hers where it gripped the armrest. It wasn’t like her to be swept away by novelty and adventure, but she’d be lying to herself if she said she hadn’t liked the feeling of respect and deference emanating from the other investigators when they understood she was there at the FBI’s behest. She was used to commanding a room in her ER, but these credentials were something even headier and intoxicating.

But when Mulder begins behaving erratically, the impulsiveness of her choice to come along hits her full force. After the pilot dies and the storm keeps closing in, she listens open-mouthed in awe to him arguing why they shouldn’t kill the organism that is laying waste to everyone it touches. He sounds crazy.

“The meteor that crashed here a quarter million years ago could have carried that type of life to earth. If we kill it now, we may never know how to stop anything like it in the future!” 

His argument is that of a curious bystander, not someone facing the possibility of his own harm — or hers. She almost admires the detachment, that his enthusiasm for the arcane and undiscovered creatures of the world extends to parasites and worms. Almost.

“I don’t want to waste a minute figuring out how to kill this thing,” she shoots back, stone-faced, a wall going up between them, for the first time insurmountable by their usual flirtation. 

“Aren’t you curious about what this all could mean?!” he counters, “how we could use this information for the greater good?”

“Honestly? No.” She barks. “I just want to get out of here alive. I don’t share this insane need of yours to hunt down and preserve every multi-celled organism that science might have overlooked!”

He looks more wounded at her words than she intended. The stress and lack of sleep have gotten to her, made her punchy and unguarded.

“Well, I’m sorry you can’t see the possibilities,” he huffs and turns away back toward the pilot’s corpse. 

Now she’s the one who’s wounded. He thinks she’s by-the-book. Unimaginative. Square. She pushes past him and heads back down the hall, stepping over the corpse as she goes. At the door she stops and looks at him pointedly. “I shouldn’t have come along.” 

“Dana, wait,” he follows her into the corridor. “I’m sorry. I never should have gotten you involved in anything like this.”

“No.” She swallows, eager to both end the argument and to put some distance between them. “You shouldn’t have.”

The thump of her dorm room door is louder than she intends, but it’s effective. On the other side of it, she hears him take a measured breath and walk away.  
_____________________________

In the morning, she manages to conduct herself professionally, honing some rusty differential diagnosis skills without the benefit of laboratory tests or the scanning technology that she usually relies on. Mulder is polite, appropriate, but edgy. She hates that he’s still carrying his gun.

When they find Murphy dead, his throat slit and his body in the freezer, her whole insides go numb. She thought she knew Mulder— knows him — but could he kill a man? Has she come this far without weighing the possibility that she doesn’t know him yet at all?

When the others start to blame him and his eyes beseech her —“Doc, it’s ME!” he shouts — she wants to run, or cry. 

“Mulder, you may not be who you are!”

When they confine him, she’s relieved. She hates herself for feeling it, but she does. Relieved she doesn’t have to look at him with the mixture of confusion and desire that clouds her judgement when it comes to him. 

They busy themselves with experiments. The air inside the bunker seems to thicken and turn. She feels like she’s choking, like she can’t explain herself clearly. Like it’s the inside of a tomb. All the ER training in the world cannot have prepared her for what she’s doing now, peering at prehistoric parasites through a microscope and hoping her wits will be enough to get them home.

And nothing prepares her for the look in his eyes when she flicks the light on in his darkened room. He squints back like a cornered animal. “Doc, I’m not infected. It’s one of them.”

She takes a deep breath, wanting to believe him, but clear in her understanding of the situation. “No one’s been killed since you’ve been in here…. and we’ve found a way to kill it.”

She watches the way his eyes widen fearfully as she explains the plan to infect him with another worm. She tries to see some evidence he’s in there, whole, that these outbursts haven’t been the fault of some grotesque creature that has latched onto his brain stem. 

“I don’t trust them,” she hears him plead. “I want to trust you.”

She swallows, the air in the jumbled storage room somehow thicker than it was a minute ago. She’s sweating, the hair at her temples curling, her uncertainty pulling her voice into a stretched whisper. 

“Okay. But they’re not here now.”

He nods, meets her gaze and turns around. She’s reminded of how tall he is, she has to stand on tiptoe to run the pads of her thumb along his spine. She hears him let out a little gulp of breath as she yanks down the back neckline of his shirt. His skin feels clammy, damp, and for a minute she imagines other, better scenarios when she might want to run her hands along his neck. His muscles quiver underneath his skin, holding something in check as her fingers run across his shoulder blades and she settles back down on the balls of her feet.

A look of relief spills across her face as he turns to look at her. For a half-second, she wishes he would smile, but his expression’s still intense. When she turns to go and he grabs her arm, she gasps. Now it’s his hands on her body that makes her sweat, makes her weak-kneed. His fingers lift the damp tendrils at the base of her scalp and he cups his hand along the plane of her neck.

She’s quivering and her mind reels in a carnival of imagined gestures — his hands on her waist, her hands on his jaw, his mouth on her neck, her breath at his ear. It’s completely inappropriate to the gravity of the moment, given what they’re facing, but she can’t help it. The air is choked with tension, as if the atoms in the room have rearranged themselves in waves that spill off one another, threatening to subsume her. 

He pulls away and she looks back up at him. His eyes are wide and full of the same relief that she had felt moments ago. “Looks like we’re both okay,” he smiles, letting his hand linger at her elbow, but not stepping back out of her personal space. She nods and places her hand briefly on his chest, meaning to tap him gently in acknowledgement, but she doesn’t pull her hand away. It rests on the curve of his pectoral, and she feels the gallop of his heart beneath his skin. 

Before she can meet his gaze completely, fully intent on backing away and out the door, Mulder’s lips come down on hers and he’s crushing her to him so tightly she almost can’t breathe. Scully nearly squeals and grabs the back of his neck with her other hand, gasping into the ferocious kiss. Mulder moves them toward the wall with the energy of a freight train, awkwardly stumbling them both into the cold metal frame of a storage shelf. He’s nearly dragging her, and her body responds by hooking a leg up onto his hip as his arm comes underneath her ass. 

When they’re pressed against the shelf, Mulder tilts his head as if he’s just beginning to get down to business, and she opens her mouth to answer the prodding of his tongue. Both her legs are wrapped around his waist now and her hands are in his hair, as if she could pull his entire smugly handsome head into her mouth. 

She wants him. Badly. Like she has never wanted anyone in her life until this moment. His mouth leaves hers and moves toward the tender flesh beneath her ear. She’s glad for a moment to breathe, but already misses his kiss.

“Oh god!” she squeaks when his tongue flicks along her pulse. 

“Mmmmm,” is all he responds, his hands now working over the curve of her ass and up along her back.

If they hadn’t just examined each other, she would swear they were both possessed by something virulent burrowing into both their brains. They’re a tangle of arms and roving hands and the heat in the room has edged up a few degrees and Scully feels her brain shut down when

BANG BANG BANG

Hodge and DeSilva’s urgent voices cut through the fog as they pound on the heavy door. “Agent Mulder! Doctor Scully! Are you okay? Let us in!!”


	8. Space

She wakes up in a clammy sweat, her pulse in her throat. The room is dark and unfamiliar. There’s a split in the heavy curtains which faintly illuminates the four-poster bed, its gauzy drapes curled around the posts like vines. 

Boston. She’s in Boston. 

It takes a minute for the last images of her vivid dream to slip off her eyelids, but she knows they’re the same torrid memories that have been haunting her for a month now. The heat of Mulder’s breath at her temples, along her neck, the way his nimble hands had grasped her ass and pressed her into the metal shelving, her body becoming heavy and thick as her fingers threaded through his sweat-damp hair.

Then always, always, the noisy interruption of Hodge and DaSilva, the BANG BANG BANG against the metal door that had stopped them cold. 

Mulder had almost dropped her, and she’d gone rigid, frozen mid-kiss, her chest heaving at the loss of his mouth from hers. She remembers wiping her arm across her mouth, smoothing the sweaty curls at her forehead and pushing back from him with a warning look. Mulder had gulped and stepped away, sheepish but understanding, and given her a slight nod. And then Scully had gone ahead of him to open up the door.

In the month since returning from Alaska, all her dreams have ended as abruptly as reality had. Most of the rest of the trip to Icy Cape has since dissolved into a blur of frenzied chases, the chaos of breaking glass, the flesh-memory of holding down DaSilva as she struggled against the worm. Adrenaline has blunted Scully’s memory of the incidents and she’s not eager to dwell on any of it, given what has happened in the days since. The only clarity she retains of the expedition are those moments in the supply closet, when she and Mulder’s breath seemed synchronized and their collision absolutely inevitable. Her dreams replay his kiss and her body responds, but every time she wakes to the imagined sound of a clanging door — as if even her subconscious warns against venturing any further down that path.

She and Mulder had spoken very little on the trip back, beyond what was necessary to make their way from tiny planes to shuttles, to the Anchorage airport, and finally back to DC. Mulder, to his credit, had been able to read her undefined discomfort, the confusion that had settled across her face when they’d learned the base was torched and anything worth knowing from their work was lost to fire. For her part, she could read the anger and resignation in his expression, realized that this kind of final scene was more typical an outcome to his work than not. 

But this wasn’t her job, or her passion, and while up until now his quests had sparked her natural curiosity, the frequent futility of it all was clearer to her now. And she felt pity. Pity, and a healthy dose of simply wanting to get home.

He had driven her home from Dulles, carried her bags up to the door, but seemed to understand implicitly that she would not invite him in. Nor would there be a repetition of earlier events. The taut string of tension that had been pulling them together was slack, but neither one of them could tell who’d dropped their end.

“Mulder,” she had lingered at the door before he left. “I know that probably wasn’t the trip that you’d envisioned…”.

“You could say that,” he sighed.

“But,” she paused to choose her words, “thank you anyway for inviting me. I don’t think I would ever have imagined doing anything like that on my own.”

A disappointed look crossed his face as he heard the goodbye lurking in her tone. “I’m sorry it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, Doc. I would never have…”

“It’s okay,” she cut him off. “It’s okay. There’s no way you could have known.”

“But I never should have put you in that position,” he confessed. “This is MY work, not yours. I should have considered all the risks.”

She shook her head, wanting now just to disappear behind her own front door. “No, really, I’m a grown up. You don’t need to apologize.”

He had nodded, swallowed hard and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll call you later?” 

“Okay.” She’d answered hoarsely, nodding, but not meeting his gaze as she stepped inside and closed the door.

________________________________________________________

That had been a month ago. She felt unbelievably foolish. 

And since she had this leave of absence from work, there wasn’t much to fill her days. She dodged her mother’s calls and went for longer runs. She set about redecorating her apartment. The living room furniture was now settled into its fourth configuration in as many weeks. 

It wasn’t that she wasn’t drawn to him — as her recurring dreams reminded her too often — but it was evident that Mulder was not just unconventional, he was risk personified. As much as she might be attracted to him, and to the novelty he represented, the better angels of Dana’s nature kept throwing up red flags. Even an amatuer dream analyst could decipher all this coitus interruptus as her body’s way of telling her to let him go. One empty weekend, she even dialed Rob, listened to his phone ring twice before quickly hanging up. 

Mulder had said he would call, but all she hears from him are voicemails, somehow only left on her answering machine at the infrequent times she’s actually left the house. First there’s one while he’s in Houston, and then another from Wisconsin. In both of them, he’s cryptic and hurried. In the first, he breathlessly describes a shuttle launch and sabotage and ghosts. In the second, he sounds crazy. He apologizes for not calling, mentions something about days he’s been in lockup for obstructing a military cleanup operation, and rambles on about an abductee with implants. Max, she thinks his name is, has suddenly gone missing, and Mulder wants to press the government for answers. In both his messages he apologizes for being so busy, for always being out-of-town. He doesn’t say he misses her, but she imagines that she hears it in his voice.

With Liz’s mid-December wedding looming, “Dr. Dana Scully and guest” had mailed her RSVP for one. 

Which is how she finds herself awake in the early a.m. darkness of the 14th floor of a Boston hotel, a slight headache from too many rehearsal dinner cocktails the night before pressing between her eyes. It’s when the thudding of her heartbeat and her head dissipates, she tastes an acrid smoke in the back of her throat, and smells something burning.


	9. Fire

Scully reaches for the phone in haste, intending to call Liz’s room and see if she also smells the smoke. There’s no dial tone. The line must be out. Sleepy concern turns quickly into urgent fear as she swings her legs over the edge of the bed and wraps a thin robe around her silk pajama set.

The smoke smell is intensifying, but no alarms are wailing and the sprinklers haven’t triggered, so Scully calms a little. Maybe somebody down the hall has burnt some popcorn in the mini-microwave? Still, she can’t shake the feeling she should do something, and all her ER training’s kicking in and making her want to take charge. She’ll find a working phone and call the desk.

She’s halfway to the elevators when she realizes she forgot to put on slippers, but the smoke smell is getting stronger, emanating from around the corner of the corridor. Worried now, she stops to bang on Liz’s door.

“Liz! It’s Dana!” She calls out between knocks. “Liz, is your phone working? There’s smoke in the hallway. We need to call for help!”

She hears only some muffled rustling from Liz’s room. Liz had had a lot to drink and is probably moving pretty slow. “Liz!” Scully calls out through the door again. “Try to call the fire department if you can, I’m going downstairs. Get some clothes on and wake the others, okay?”

There’s a mumbled answer that Scully doesn’t have time to respond to. She is punching the elevator buttons when it occurs to her she probably shouldn’t take the elevator in a fire. As she pushes against the heavy stairwell door, she catches a glimpse of a short dark-haired man darting around a corner, striding toward the smoke-filled hallway, not away from it.

Scuffling down fourteen flights of concrete stairs in her bare feet leaves her slightly sweaty and winded. She’s more than a little dazed as she stumbles into the formal foyer, all soft music and candlelight and floral arrangements, but she’s running on adrenaline, frantically trying to figure out the way to the front desk.

Until the scene in front of her stops her cold.

It’s Mulder. The man whose voice messages on her machine she’s been unable to erase. The man whose tongue had been down her throat in that cold Alaskan storage closest, the memory of which has kept her lit up and awake a dozen nights since. And he’s not alone, he’s with a brunette in a slinky floor-length gown. It takes Scully’s brain a minute to process what she’s seeing, but they’re dancing slow. She watches as the woman tilts her head up unmistakably and Mulder bends to press his lips along her cheek.

If real physical fire were actually licking up her body that moment, Scully could not have flushed more hotly with embarrassment. A cascade of something between jealousy and shame snakes down the her neck, settling in the pit of her stomach, making it hard to breathe. They don’t see her, and for a moment she is grateful. She’s barefoot in a robe, braless under her pajamas, and her hair is sweaty at her temples, her face beet red with exertion from her flight down the stairs.

Smoke. The fire. She snaps back to attention, the potential seriousness of things negating her urge to simply disappear. “Mulder!” She calls out, interrupting them before their kiss gets further than a peck. “There’s a fire on the fourteenth floor!”

Mulder shakes his head, startled and momentarily confused. “Dana? What are you doing here?” His voice trails off.

“Fourteenth floor?” The brunette asks, turning toward Scully with a perfunctory appraisal in her gaze before turning back to Mulder and touching him on the arm. “That’s where the children are!”

Before Scully can ask questions, Mulder takes off toward the stairwell and the woman runs back toward the ballroom. She’s bewildered, but barely has time to resume her journey toward the front desk when a man tumbles out of the elevator with two blonde boys in tow.

In the crush of bodies and the confusion of the scene, as firemen and hotel guests in various states of dress and undress swarm the lobby, it takes some time for Scully to realize that Mulder hasn’t reappeared from the upper floors. She scans the room and locates the woman he’d been dancing with, who is apparently reuniting the young boys with their parents. She stands close to their father, her hand on his upper arm, her other hand tussling the youngest child’s hair. Scully swallows her embarrassment at her disheveled state and makes her way toward them.

“Excuse me,” she interrupts.

“Yes?” The woman moves toward her, transmitting only slight annoyance at the interruption.

“Have you seen Mulder?”

“I’m sorry, do you know him?” The annoyance is more tangible now.

“We’re,” Scully pauses, “friends.”

“I assume he’s giving a report to the fire crew,” the woman answers with an archness to her tone.

“Last I saw him,” Scully continues, insistent, “he was heading upstairs, toward the fire.”

“I think we have things under control here, Miss... what was your name?” The woman raises an eyebrow and appraises Scully’s robe, her bare feet and her unkempt hair.

“Scully. Dana Scully,” she answers shortly. “And you are?”

“Detective Green.” The woman doesn’t move, but seems to dismiss her with an upward tilt of her chin.

Scully nods in return and moves toward the stairwell herself just as the fire crew tumbles through, a slack-armed Mulder in their grasp. They settle him against the wall and motion to the paramedics to administer oxygen, but before they can get the mask over his mouth, Scully rushes to kneel on the carpet next to him, checking his vitals and brushing the soot from his brow. He moves ineffectually to brush her hand away, but he’s clearly too exhausted to fight back much. She settles back on her heels and watches as the oxygen starts to draw his color back into his cheeks.

“What happened?” She asks after he’s calmed down.

“No big deal,” he shrugs. “Let’s just say I’m not a big fan of fire.”

“Who is?” She chuckles before drawing her robe tighter around her. She sees his eyes drifting downward to notice her pajamas and her grubby feet. They both don’t look their best.

“What are you doing here?” Mulder asks, bewildered, “I mean, thanks for the assist, but I’m a little confused what you’re doing in the same hotel as me in Boston?”

“Liz is getting married here tomorrow — or at least that was the plan, I guess we’ll see what happens after the fire.”

“Liz?” Mulder’s still confused and woozy from the smoke.

“My friend — you remember, the one whose bachelorette party I was at in Atlantic City?”

“We do seem to keep running into each other, don’t we Doc?” He grins. She smiles back, but quickly looks away, remembering she’d just caught him kissing this Detective Green a few moments before, and remembering that the last time they were together he’d been kissing her. The silence grows a little awkward before she gets the nerve to ask.

“So why are you here? You on some kind of date?” She hates that she’s asking and tries to toss it off nonchalantly. He swallows somewhat guiltily.

“Um, no. I’m on a case.” He explains.

“Nice tux for a case.” Scully gestures to his formalwear.

“Oh this. Phoebe… Detective Green … thought we should attend tonight as a ploy. You know, blend in and try to catch the guy.” Mulder stumbles over his words a bit.

“The guy?”

“Arsonist. Been stalking these British families, setting men on fire, burning down pubs, ya know. That’s why Phoebe… Detective Green… is here. She’s Scotland Yard. Called me in as a private favor.”

“How private?” Scully pushes, surprising herself at her forwardness, but the combination of curiosity and the gravitational pull of his body sitting so closely to hers on the hotel floor is making her bold.

“Um, we knew each other at school. At Oxford.” She imagines he looks guilty though she doesn’t know why he should. “She called me in on this case last week, thought I might be interested in her three pipe problem.”

“And how’s that going, Sherlock?”

He smiles back when she gets the reference. “Well Doc, we have a profile and some eyewitnesses. Shouldn’t be too long before we catch him.”

Scully smoothes her palm across his beaded forehead again. “I don’t think you should be doing any catching, not tonight at least. You’re overheated. And they’ll probably want to check you out for smoke inhalation.”

He nods, more compliant than she had seen him in Alaska. The memory of that trip makes her swallow hard. “You should lie down for awhile. You can… um.” She knows what she’s going to say will probably sound forward, but she can pass it off as just concern for his condition, right? She starts again, “I have a room upstairs… that’s how I smelled the smoke… if you want to come lie down.”

“And I was just beginning to make myself at home on this beige carpet,” he winks. “Aren’t they evacuating you?”

Her eyes widen. She hadn’t thought of that.

“No,” says an accented voice from behind her. “They’re not evacuating guests except from the directly affected rooms, at least not until the morning.”

Phoebe steps close to Mulder and bends to smooth his hair, looking down at him expectantly and extending him her hand. “Shall we go up?” Phoebe beckons him with a nod of her chin.

As Mulder hoists himself up off the floor, Scully does the same, straightening the elastic waistband of her pajamas and pulling her robe around herself even more tightly. She catches something like an apology in his eye as he and Phoebe make their way toward the elevators.

“Good night,” Scully says, her voice falling flat when it’s clear they haven’t heard her. She hears them, though, and the last thing she hears before the doors slide shut is Phoebe lilting about there being “still one more fire to put out.”


End file.
